When I tell people I write a newspaper column, their first response is usually, “I've heard of newspapers, but I had no idea they still existed.”

Then they ask what I write about. I tell them I like to find a subject, any subject, and expose some shred of hope, some kernel of goodness in it. But this gets hard during campaign, war and pestilence seasons, which are year-round now.

There is something wrong with us, something deeper than what we are seeing on the surface. I've known addicts in my life, self-destructive souls who can't stop taking others down with them. And always, every single time, the addiction is just a symptom of something else; the sign of grease belying the grime creature behind the stove after so many years of neglect.

That’s what I see when I scan the news.

The ills of society, and add what you want to my list, are just a symptom, a tragic warning of something buried so much farther down in our collective and individual DNA. It’s a species-level anomaly that goes by many names: greed, avarice, covetousness, selfishness, self-centeredness, self-absorption.

In broad strokes, it is our inability to think of others before ourselves; our all-consuming craving to get what I want first and at all costs. All of the world's ills are driven by this.

Our lives are spent in constant battle. Day by day, the waves of self-satisfaction in us crash against the jetties that keep us from attaining our political, economic, societal, spiritual and corporeal desires. This is the human condition: fighting back that current of self-absorption that threatens to sweep us away with tsunami force.